Day 110: Well, this is a little embarrassing. However, when I stand back and really look at it, it's also hilarious.
While out on a four-mile walk on the relatively new and extraordinarily ugly levee trail in Orting yesterday, I was searching for anything noteworthy for my daily posts. I thought I'd struck paydirt when I found a script lichen unlike anything I'd seen before, multiple examples of it occurring on several young Red Alders on the bank of the Puyallup River. I could not remove a sample without damaging the bark. Nor did I have a hand lens, so I took close-up photos of several different examples and conducted a visual analysis with my nose to the tree. The lirellae (the type of apothecia unique to the scripts) seemed to be incised into the bark rather than rising above it. I knew that some species have lirellae which lie beneath the bark surface, so I was sure that would narrow the field when I began searching for an ID. I kept thinking, "They look like dirty thumbprints in wet paint...how very odd!" and reviewing my eidetic memory files, I couldn't recall having seen anything with that morphology in either Brodo or McCune. A diligent page-by-page search of both field guides confirmed my fears: this one was going to be problematic. In the end, I gave up and for the first time in well over a year, sent photos off to lichenologist extraordinaire Katherine Glew, explaining that "I just can't make this one fit in anywhere." I had a note back from her in my morning email clarifying the authorship of the unusual script: "This looks like grazing by a snail or slug."
Live and learn. I do not get to add another lichen to my Life List, but at least now I will be able to recognize the marks of snail teeth. Whodathunkit?
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